1. Field of the Invention
Various embodiments of the invention relates to the area of optical communications photonic integrated circuits (PICs). In particular, the embodiments described herein generally relate to receivers for fiber optic or free space communications, and coherent receivers with monolithically integrated tunable local oscillator light sources.
2. Description of the Related Art
High bandwidth time division multiplexing (TDM) links can advantageously reduce the size, weight and/or power required in the system. Receiver architectures are configured to receive and detect time division multiplexed signals are generally designed to operate at a certain bit-rate. It may be desirable to design TDM links and systems that operate at variable bit-rates. In such systems, it may not be possible to use current receiver architectures since it may not be possible to rapidly configure the current coherent receiver devices to detect signals having variable operational bit-rates. Thus, there is a need for a scalable coherent receiver that can switch rapidly to detect different operational bit-rates. For some applications it may be advantageous to have shot noise limited receivers.